A Deterministic Control Plane for LLM Coding Agents — 10.1% of Agent Configs Are Exact Cross-Repo Duplicates

arXiv 2606.26924·high signal

A prevalence study of 10,008 public GitHub repositories (6,145 agent config files — rules files, agent definitions, IDE markdown) finds 10.1% of tracked paths are SHA-256 exact duplicates across independent repos, with 75.5% of clone pairs near-identical. The authors argue agent configurations are propagating as undeclared, unmanaged shared components and propose a deterministic control plane to govern them. Relevant to anyone maintaining CLAUDE.md-style steering files who wants version-controlled, auditable agent configuration.